no third solution

Blogging about liberty, anarchy, economics and politics

All of Our Productivity is Wasted

July 17th, 2008

There is some evidence that we’re making progress: working less, living longer, getting fatter. All this, to an extent and in certain context, appears true. I certainly won’t argue that the average life in 1870 was better than it is now (although none of us are really qualified to make that determination), and I think you really (and I mean really) have to go out on a limb to say that life was better in 1970 than it was in 2007. Reality just doesn’t play out that way. Most things we buy are better than they were then, many things we buy didn’t even exist a decade or so ago. All the stuff we have is better, or we have more of it. I often find myself reiterating: the true indicator of wealth in a society is an abundance of goods and services.

But are we that much better off with all these things? Do we really put the costs in perspective? I think we don’t.

Neglected, is the (mostly recent) prevalence of two principal income earners in a household. We might be working less, but there undoubtedly are more of us, doing more work.

I am also quite skeptical of the claim that the average person worked 700 hours more in 1970, than does the average person in 2007; that’s basically two full days of additional labor each week! Do the figures include commuting time? As we’ve become an increasingly suburban society, commute time has increased significantly. It’s not uncommon for people to spend an hour (or more) in the morning on the drive in to the office, and another hour (or more) in the evening, on the way home. This isn’t work, and it’s not a household chore, but it sure is a pain in the ass and it ought to count against something.

There is some crazy math going on here. Through technology and innovation, the average worker is several orders of magnitude more productive than he might’ve been a half-century hence, and a hundred times (or more) more productive than he was a century ago. We’ve got more more people doing more jobs, producing more things and still we’re working 40 or 50 or 60 hours a week.

And this doesn’t strike anybody as being just a little bit insane?

At The Picket Line, David Gross asks:

How does it make sense to spend extra hours at work to earn enough money to pay for a gym membership so you can lose the pounds you’ve put on from sitting in your desk chair all those extra hours at work? How does it make sense to work extra hours so you can afford a meal in a nice restaurant once in a while because you don’t have time after all those extra hours at work to shop and cook and do the dishes if you want to do it yourself?

…One measure of abundance is this: what percentage of your time and energy — what percentage of your life — are you spending on your own priorities and passions, and what percentage do you have to spend on priorities that contradict and oppose them. Now, by “your priorities” I don’t just mean “your own selfish interests” but your values, the things you think are worthwhile and important.

Has all of our stuff really made our leisure time so much more enjoyable than it was, that we’re willing to work more, for less? I doubt it. People work because they have to in order to enjoy their leisure (and to generally keep living). If they didn’t have to do it, it wouldn’t be called work. The “right” ratio is the smallest amount of work to the greatest amount of leisure. All else being equal, less work doesn’t make our lives less satisfying; the optimal amount of “work” is zero. As in none.

If you’re having difficulty following me here, (with apologies to “Fight Club”), repeat after me:

I am not my job. I am not how much money I have in the bank. I am not the car I drive. I am not the contents of my wallet. I am not my fucking khakis.

None of these things define us as a people, none of these things makes us better or worse human beings.

If money was no object, you’d be riding your horse somewhere, shooting hoops with your friends, hiking the Appalachian trail, reading poetry by a campfire, training for that marathon you’d always wanted to run but for which you could never find the time, learning how to play guitar, spending more time with your kids.

Even if you love your job, you’d never step foot in that fucking office again.

Discussing the concept of buying out at the bottom, Vinay Gupta gets to the heart of the matter:

The slack – the waste – in our old ways of life were consuming 90% of our productive labor to maintain.

A thousand dollar a month combined fuel bill is your life energy going down the drain because the place you live sucks your life way in waste heat, which is waste money, which is waste time. Your car, your house, the portion of your taxes which the Government spends on fuel, on electricity, on waste heat… all of the time you spent to earn that money is wasted…

Ninety-percent is probably a pretty accurate figure for most people, when you sum all the direct and indirect forms of taxes to which we’re subjected. Add up the State and Federal withholding. Add to that both “halves” of the OASDI/SS/Medicare. Don’t forget about property taxes. Literally, or figuratively, the rent that you pay to a landlord who took out a mortgage on your future. Gas taxes. Sin taxes. Telephone taxes. Add the invisible ones, too. Account for the inflation that destroys our savings, the costs of taxes and regulation borne by the businesses we patronize, passed on in the form of higher prices. There are a million fucking reasons why we’re working too hard, for too little.

For most people, 90% of their life is cannibalized by government. We can’t imagine living on just 10% or 20% of what we currently earn.

The irony is that we’re already doing it.

Scrip Currency is a Recipe for Disaster

July 9th, 2008

John Robb of Global Guerrillas wants to see more people and communities using scrip.

Although I’m generally supportive of people who don’t want to use FRNs for the bulk of their transactions, I’m sincerely skeptical about the viability of local scrip currencies. Some of the finder details, according to Robb, are as follows:

1. Allow community members to use it to pay all or part of their tax liabilities to local governments. This instantly establishes a market for the currency. Also, pay local government employees a portion of their wages in scrip.
2. Deflate the value of the scrip (optimally, one percent per month) to promote immediate use rather than hoarding.
3. To the extent possible, connect scrip to local production rather than retail. Locally produced food (farmer’s markets), energy (via local microgrids), products (personal fabs), and labor/services. Further, work with local banks to establish checking accounts for scrip and to enable conversions hard currencies (at a slight discount).

Presumably, the municipality would have to spend scrip locally, and I’m sure there would be a provision that would force merchants to accept it at some rate other than that which they would freely accept. The second point is an unabashed attack on people’s ability to save for the future. Finally, we are supposed to regulate whereand how transactions thus denominated can be facilitated.

Let’s rephrase the building blocks of scrip:

1. Force people to use scrip.
2. Destroy people’s ability to save for the future.
3. Tell businesses (banks, retailers, producers) how the scrip is to be used.

Sounds like a fine recipe for economic disaster, if you ask me. Robb suggests that local scrip should depreciate people’s savings on the order of 12% annually. This is about on par with what the Federal Reserve is doing to the Greenback; excuse me for not understanding how depreciating scrip is a step in the right direction.

Now, Silvio Gesell came to mind immediately, so I’m not at all surprised to see that Robb references our pal Mr. Gesell here, and here.Gesell argues that:

Money, which is to replace barter, should secure, accelerate and cheapen the exchange of goods.

If security, acceleration and cheapening of the exchange of goods can be achieved by means of a form of money which cannot be harmed by moth and rust and which besides, can be conveniently hoarded, then let us, by all means, have such money. But if this form of money diminishes the security, rapidity and cheapness of the exchange of goods, we say: Away with it!.

I’ll add Gesell, whose ideas I’m familiar with (although I haven’t read his works) to my ever-growing list of things to read, although at the onset I should qualify that I’m not particularly optimistic about what I might find. Mises’ regression theorem tells us in a nutshell that money originates from free exchange and is settled upon voluntarily among the market participants. A scheme like Gesell’s can only be implemented by violent suppression of free exchange.

Now, Gesell probably wasn’t a metallurgist, but he should’ve known that gold doesn’t corrode, and can’t be eaten by moths. Especially in a modern context, the cost of storage and security is low, and transfers can be made securely, instantly, and electronically. Furthermore, throughout the ages, in addition to merely accelerating and cheapening the exchange of goods (i.e., eliminating the double-coincidence of wants), one of the prime functions of money has been to store value. Gesell, and our friend here seek to eliminate money’s value-storing capabilities by foisting upon us some sort of quasi-money that for a number of reasons, few people would voluntarily accept.

Now, it seems that Robb wants to foster community, and believe me, I’m all in favor of fostering community, neighborliness, mutual aid, etc. I just don’t think that you can effectively accomplish “community” by forcing people to be dependent upon the collective and removing their individual ability to sustain themselves, their friends, and their families. If you can’t save for the future, you are forced by nature to depend on others—this isn’t community, its socialism. There is a difference.

Community is always voluntary.Inherent in Gesell’s plan (and Robb’s depreciating scrip) is the notion that consumption now is somehow superior to consumption at any subsequent point in time. Savings, sometimes referred to in the pejorative as “hoarding” (e.g., by Keynesians especially) is always directed towards anticipated future consumption, is to be admonished, while immediate consumption is to be lauded. How anyone can reach the conclusion that a certain and precise ratio of savings to consumption is optimal at all times, and in all places, and for all individuals, is beyond me.

Any effort to regulate the natural rate of time preference is bound to fail; and any measure which relies on forcing people to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do, is patently immoral.

What Could You Do With Allodial Title?

July 8th, 2008

I noted previously that I’d like to write more about Allodium, in response to Orville Seymer left a comment on Why You Can’t Buy Allodial Title. He suggests a book by John Cobin, Ph.D. and I was able to locate a PDF version of the book for $5.95.

Most states in the Union which have or had a clause in their constitution pertaining to Allodium (e.g., New York) have rescinded that section in whole or in part, because they determined that Allodial title is an antiquated notion. It must be nice to make the laws, and determine that certain impediments to increasing one’s own arbitrary dominion, are “frivolous” or “antiquated.”

Much like the “frivolous” arguments against paying one’s taxes (PDF), (determined to be frivolous, of couse, by the same entity that levies and collects those taxes!) any constitutional provision quickly becomes “antiquated” when the governnment unilaterally decides to stop respecting it. Allodial title is “antiquated” becaues the government stopped respecting it.

According to the wikipedia entry on Allodial title,

[I]n the United States most lands are not allodial, as evidenced by the existence of property taxes

Fee simple is the highest form of ownership that any individual may generally attain in the United States. In the United States individuals cannot acquire Allodial title, because under what is essentially martial law, the Federal Government has declared itself owner of all lands, through the issuance of a Land Patent drafted and deemed sufficient by its own agents. The same Government which declares itself the rightful owner of all lands, is the arbiter who ultimately determines that you or I can’t own those lands.

There are some websites suggesting that an individual can assume the original land patent from the time when the Federal Government held land in trust for future conveyance. This looks to me very much like the spurious claims that one can record an affidavit renouncing the IRS at the local register of deeds. I doubt the applicability of these propositions with regards to one’s right to claim full Allodial title through secession (especially because they suggest that property taxes are a “contract” entered into between a landowern/tenant and the governing municpality), although the section explaining the difference between “real estate” and “land” is interesting.

Some people say that you can’t transfer or convey Allodial title to real property without it losing its Allodial status. This argument appears to be facially absurd: if you own the property as an outright freehold, you can do whatever you want with it. There is no other status to which it ought logically revert upon sale. Then again, I’m not a legal scholar.

Some people say that Allodial title fell out of favor because it can’t be mortgaged for improvements since land held Allodially can’t be encumbered. That possibility, by itself, is only an explanation for why few properties are held in Allodium, it is not an explanation for the legal disregard of a centuries-old principle.

The current system of title and encumbrance and the governing jurisprudence is heavily influenced by the State’s laws. Any contest pertaining to this system also must be fought in one of the State’s courts. Accordingly, the State could refuse to recognize as valid, certain mortgage contracts, to the final effect of creating a disincentive to lend to Allodial titleholders. I have no idea whether this is historical fact, or not, but I see no reason why an owner of Allodium couldn’t put up his property as collateral for a loan.

There are probably about a dozen ways that you could work around this detail through contracts and joint ownership in a free society, as long as you expunge the patently retarded notion that Allodial title can’t be conveyed; there is no reason a proper conveyance couldn’t occur if both the grantor and grantee wished it to remain a freehold, and there’s little reason to believe they wouldn’t.

If Allodial title can’t be conveyed, it’s because the State refuses to accept such conveyance as legitimate. If the State can exercise this sort of overarching ownership interest, title is not really held in Allodium to begin with. The State cannot permit Allodium; doing so would invalidate its fraudulent claim of monopolistic ownership pertaining to all land within its arbitrarily defined, violently created and maintained borders.